At long last, I am back! First I wish t apologize, for what is going to be a long post. Okay... it has been a while, but there is a good reason for that; I will explain: not long after classes started this year, I had a medical emergency which I had feared would happen sooner or later. You remember that I told you guys that I suspected that I had a condition known as eosinophilic esophagitis? Yeah, that problem... I had notified my allergist of this concern, and I was scheduled to meet with a GI doctor in three (yes, 3) months! I was worried, and I told my doctor this too, that I would have an emergency before I was able to make that appointment. Guess what? I did! September 25 at 9:30ish my mom took me to the emergency room for food impaction. Now, allow me to explain what food impaction is: quite simply, food gets stuck in your esophagus. And that is indeed a medical emergency. What was I eating? None of your business (although there is a rumor that I had made some rather dry, meatloaf that night...), what is important here is that for 5 hours I could not get the food to move its way down my esophagus. That means that I had started eating around 4-4:30 pm. One may well wonder if I had noticed any warning signs previous to this incident, and the answer is a resounding yes. I had been experiencing nausea for months, and it had only gotten worst over time; nothing ever came out, but my mom told me that it was a side effect of eosinophilic esophagitis. Not only that, I had episodes of choking on my food, which like the episodes of nausea, had grown worse over time, in fact, the intensity and frequency of the choking was alarming to the point that my family was worried. Anyway, my mom took me to the emergency room, and I was taken back for surgery (not for a while, though it was around 2:00 am the next morning before anything really happened). The surgery went alright, except for the perforation in my esophagus. I woke up with a lot of pain in my throat, which I assumed was from the surgery (I had not idea there was a tear), and I thought that the pain would go away with use after all, I had my tonsils removed, and that is what I was told to do then, so it should have worked here, right? NO. The doctors came in and told mom that they needed to take me back for x-rays, they were worried that there was a perforation in my esophagus. At first, this did not sound too serious to me, until the doctors said that it could introduce major complications (e.g. food leaking out into the heart and lung area, infection, etc.), this sounded serious. So, I was taken back to do a swallow study, and let me tell ya: that stuff they make you swallow is disgusting (I was not doing a Barium swallow, I am allergic to it, guess how I know?). It was very painful doing the swallow study, but the images showed that there was indeed a perforation. My Radiologist, who had a funny last name, told me that this would require one of two or three options: I would either be given nourishment via a feeding tube until the perforation healed, the doctors could surgically repair the perforation, or I could be given fluids through an IV, and have nothing by mouth until the perforation healed. Naturally, I was not given much of a choice, but when I was taken back to mom, I broke down and cried, I was scared that I would be put on a feeding tube. Fortunately, the doctors thought that it would be best to give me nothing by mouth; surgery would be saved for an emergency, and a tube would have been too invasive, so for 4.5-5 days, I had nothing by mouth until my esophagus healed (I binged on Food Network). I think the worse part of the whole being-in-the-hospital was the fact that I was in the middle of classes! Thank God, I had very caring and understanding professors, or I would have been sunk. For the next two and a half months following the surgery, I had to eat a soft/pureed food diet, which was no fun. I am glad that it is over. Before the doctors let me go, I was scheduled for an upper endoscopy where they would take samples of my esophagus to see what was going on that caused the food impaction. The test results showed that I have Eosinophilic Esophagitis or, EOE. I can now eat regular food, it is advised though that I stay away from steak-like foods, but I will be using an inhaler (I will be swallowing instead of inhaling the steroid) help control it. Thanks for sticking with me!
